6 | UNITA ConvergenceinTelecoms andiT 4. Read the magazine article about trends in Telecoms and IT. Match the industry leader to their area of expertise. 1 Peter Wilson a software 2 JennyLane b telecoms 3. Sanjay Ravi c hardware STATE OF PLAY To celebrate our 10” ant sary, We invited industry leaders to share their thoughts about the changing world of Telecoms and IT. To find out what they think, read on ... Peter Wilson The world is now plugged in, and countries are connected up using a mixture of terrestrial networks, undersea cables, satellite and micro- wave communications, Wi-Max and Wi-Fi, GSM and 3G. The move from packet-based services to the intemet protocol means everyone expects to ‘communicate voice, dataandvideotrom. anywhere to anywhere, globally. The availability of wide area data services ‘suchas MPLS andEthernethavespread all over the world, allowing companies to manage and communicate with their operations wherever they may be. ‘A reason for this has been the fall in bandwidth costs, and broadband is getting cheaper and cheaper. Services can now deliver tens or even hundreds ‘of megabits of bandwidth into individual homes for much less money than a 64Kb line that a whole factory might have used to runits operation only afew years ago. Jenny Lane In 1965 Gordon Moore stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double about every two years. And that has more or less remained true since then. As we write, asingle chip can hold about 1 billon transistors each making 3billion binary calculations per second. There hasbeen a huge increase in the volume of data and data storage capacity required for this; secondly, there has been a significant decrease in the size and power consumption of hardware and finally manufacturing costs are falling significantly. The result is that there are more and more our lives, and gigabytes of data holding thousands of MP3 music files or hundreds of films. Sanjay Ravi The intemet is changing the way we access, buy and use applications. We 90 online and download the software ‘we want onto our computer, ike any other digital product. Increasingly we don't even have the software on our hardware, but visit an internet site and use that application as a service. The Use of this Software as a Service (SaaS) mode! means that we may not need such powerful computers in the future. We have seen the impact of off shoring and the rise of India as the world centre of software development ‘and application management. We are also seeing some of the smartest applications and services coming out of people's bedrooms; more and more experts are producing Open source software, which is becoming more and more popular, creating a real threat to the big corporations.